Rights Collide as Town Clerk Sidesteps Role in Gay Marriages

Rose Marie Belforti, the town clerk in Ledyard, N.Y., does not want to sign same-sex marriage licenses, and has arranged for a deputy to issue all marriage licenses by appointment.Credit
Brett Carlsen for The New York Times

LEDYARD, N.Y. — Rose Marie Belforti is a 57-year-old cheese maker, the elected town clerk in this sprawling Finger Lakes farming community and a self-described Bible-believing Christian. She believes that God has condemned homosexuality as a sin, so she does not want to sign same-sex marriage licenses; instead, she has arranged for a deputy to issue all marriage licenses by appointment.

But when a lesbian couple who own a farm near here showed up at the town hall last month, the women said they were unwilling to wait.

Now Ms. Belforti is at the heart of an emerging test case, as national advocacy groups look to Ledyard for an answer to how the state balances a religious freedom claim by a local official against a civil rights claim by a same-sex couple.

Ms. Belforti, represented by a Christian legal advocacy group based in Arizona, the Alliance Defense Fund, is arguing that state law requires New York to accommodate her religious beliefs.

“New York law protects my right to hold both my job and my beliefs,” she said in an interview last week, pausing briefly to collect $50 from a resident planning to take 20 loads of refuse to the town dump. “I’m not supposed to have to leave my beliefs at the door at my government job.”

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Rose Marie Belforti says state law “protects my right to hold both my job and my beliefs.”Credit
Brett Carlsen for The New York Times

But the couple, Deirdre DiBiaggio and Katie Carmichael of Miami, are arguing that the law requires all clerks in New York to provide marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The couple are being represented by a liberal advocacy organization, People for the American Way, based in Washington.

“Gay people have fought so long and hard to get these civil rights,” said Ms. Carmichael, 53, a filmmaker. “To have her basically telling us to get in the back of the line is just not acceptable.”

Ms. Belforti is one of several town clerks who have said the state’s Marriage Equality Act, the measure approved in June that legalized same-sex marriage in New York, violates their religious beliefs. Two clerks resigned in July rather than comply with the law.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, who made same-sex marriage a priority of his first year in office, has expressed little sympathy for clerks who object to the law. “When you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose,” he said this summer. And the State Health Department issued a memorandum to clerks that refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples would be a misdemeanor.

But compliance is being tested here in Ledyard, a town of 1,900 people on the shore of Cayuga Lake that has thousands of acres of corn and soybeans and not one traffic light.

Ms. Belforti, a Republican, first won election as town clerk a decade ago, and thought she had a creative solution this summer to a vexing problem by agreeing to delegate the signing of marriage licenses.

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Deirdre DiBiaggio, left, and Katie Carmichael argue that state law requires all clerks to give marriage licenses to gay couples.Credit
Nytcredit: Michael F. Mcelroy for The New York Times

“For me to participate in the same-sex marriage application process I don’t feel is right,” she said. “God doesn’t want me to do this, so I can’t do what God doesn’t want me to do, just like I can’t steal, or any of the other things that God doesn’t want me to do.”

The clerk’s office is open nine hours a week — Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. Ms. Belforti also does duty cleaning the town hall bathrooms. And she is a farmer, married with four grown daughters, who makes probiotic kefir cheese.

A Protestant who worships at several area churches, Ms. Belforti read to a reporter a passage from the first chapter of Romans, which she says condemns homosexual activity, offering it as an explanation for her stance.

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“This is about religious freedom,” she said. “This is not about trashing gay people.”

But Ms. DiBiaggio and Ms. Carmichael say it is discriminatory, and they are contemplating filing a lawsuit. The women, who have been together for 10 years and own a working farm in nearby Springport, declined Ms. Belforti’s request that they make an appointment and return later when they stopped by the Ledyard clerk’s office seeking a marriage license.

“I was shocked,” Ms. Carmichael said.

Deborah Liu, the general counsel for the People for the American Way Foundation, which is working with a New York law firm, Proskauer Rose, on the case, said, “We totally respect everyone’s right to have their own personal beliefs.” But Ms. Belforti, Ms. Liu said, “doesn’t have the right to use them to relieve herself from doing a major part of her duties.”

The issue has roiled this town, where Republicans slightly outnumber Democrats, and often on Election Day there are fewer voters than for a race for high school class president. Most of the town is farmland, but Ledyard also contains the village of Aurora, home to Wells College, an opera house and a lakeside inn where a one-night wine country getaway goes for as much as $813 per couple.

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Ledyard is a farming town with 1,900 residents.Credit
The New York Times

In interviews last week, some residents applauded Ms. Belforti for standing up for her beliefs, while others said she should either sign all marriage licenses or find another line of work.

“You get about a 50-50 split,” said Jim Wilcox, 42, who runs the white-clapboard Wilcox General Store and who got his own marriage license from Ms. Belforti a few years ago. He called the Marriage Equality Act “a long time coming” and worried that the controversy could paint Ledyard in a bad light. “We’d hate to be the ones who slowed down the wheels of change here,” he said.

Another resident, Ed Easter, is now seeking to defeat Ms. Belforti in a write-in campaign when she is up for re-election in November. Mr. Easter, 40, who works in a wine tasting room, said he felt that someone needed to challenge her, rather than assuming the courts would eventually settle the matter.

“The easiest way for her to go, and to settle this whole issue, is to take it to a vote — just vote her out of office,” he said.

Ms. Belforti said she had no regrets. Her re-election campaign literature consists of a handout that trumpets her maintenance of nine different record-keeping computer databases and the town’s Web site. She also notes that she is facing a challenger, “because I have taken a stand on same-sex marriage.”

“I’m totally at peace, because God comes first for me,” she said. “It’s not a question at all. If they want to get me out, you know, I’ve shown them what I can do for 10 years — if that’s not good enough and people want somebody else, that is their choice.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 28, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rights Collide as Town Clerk Sidesteps Role in Gay Marriages. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe